I think much of this has bbeen said already, but anyway, here are my thoughts:

Marjock - Attraption

I think the biggest problem with this game is that the rules of interaction between the coloured balls aren't explained anywhere. The game looks good and the simple gameplay can be built up to produce complex puzzles. Unfortunately I couldn't work out how to predict what would happen when I placed a ball in a particular place, and was pretty much reduced to dropping things in random squares to see what happened.

LaRue - Globegoons

I was a little confused by the irrelevant controls listed in the preferences window on start-up, but I assume that must a Unity thing. Beyond that, the game is simple, and yet the chain reactions can be so complex that I can't even begin to predict what might happen next. I can see some people finding this extremely addictive.

ThemsAllTook - Gamut

This is my personal favourite. A sort of combination of Pipe Mania and colour theory. The difficulty curve seems well balanced, and puzzles can be solved logically in your own time. My biggest criticism is that sometimes, when a number of filters are joined together, it is a little unclear why no blobs are making it out the other side. A little more visual feedback would easily solve that though.
A nice idea and brought to a very impressive level given the time limit.

iridescent ion - Pipe Nightmares

It's simple and it works perfectly. Unfortunately I've always hated this style of puzzle - it reminds me of the little games I used to find hidden in the corner of the isle in Black and White, which I would play with for 20 minutes before giving up and vowing to never go back into that area. That's not a reflection on the game, just my personal tastes.

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The important thing is that they are all far more complete and functional than my entry. I can't say I'm surprised by that - I spent a lot of my coding time trying to hunt down strange bugs, and never got the vital level loading code to work. But anyway, I just wanted to congratulate everyone on their entries. Well done. Appologies to anyone who wasted bandwidth downloading my entry I'm already embarking on a major rewrite - probably without SDL since I just don't seem to be able to get on with it. I'm not saying SDL is incredibly unstable, its just some wierd karma thing.

Najdorf - Use tab to switch to a wrench that spans two pipes instead of just one.
AnotherJake - Displaying a tip about the tab key is a good idea.

Those getting a NilObjectException: I've tracked this down with two people, and in both cases it was because they were running on a case sensitive file system. My code looked for the "Data" folder, and the folder was called "data." Just a little detail I forgot to correct
To play the contest version, simply change the "data" folder to "Data."

In any case, I have made some changes to the game. I removed the larger wrench and changed levels that would be impossible without that wrench. I also extended the time limits. This means that if you end up with two turned pipes right next to each other you have to work one of them all the way around. Skilled players will be able to avoid these situations, taking less time to complete the level and getting more points.

couldn't get my own entry started, but i reviewed them. in general i thought all the entries i played were great. very impressed what was done in only a weeks time. congrats to all.

in the order i played them...

Attraption
- the initial menu buttons look "grayed-out" and that just confused the hell outta me for some reason. i thought i couldn't click there until i did something else first. in any case i got past it.
- like the game play concept, i had trouble solving the puzzles though. i had to resort to trial an error because it was hard to predict what would happen. i could never solve the final level...
- i noticed on some levels, i think some of the balls are just red-herrings and aren't involved in the solution. this makes it harder to guess, but irritates me, because i'm not sure where to start.

Gamut
- very non-intuitive game but was fun none the less. i think it would help if you had some tutorial or training for each of the different mechanisms. i had to resort to trial and error to figure out how each one worked. overall things like hue shift and brightness shift always required me to use trial and error to figure out how to set it up. how do i relate a hue shift of 3 to red?
- because i would experiment on how different objects worked, i often just through all the pieces into puzzle to see how it worked. unfortunately i wouldn't always remember which pieces i could move. some kind of coloration on the black grid to indicate which peices can be moved.
- would like a key to rotate the piece.
- i noticed level 8 has one extra piece that wasn't needed. (one of the straight pipes)
- totally impressed at your ability to develop those puzzle levels. level 8 was wicked with adding pipes to one of the routes to alter the timing.

Globegoons
- easy to learn and understand!
- maybe needs something to make it more "gamelike"
- i had a bug where after i lost and then game went back to the start screen, when i would start a new game to first bubble that pops, the "bullets" don't collide with anything and fly offscreen, then the game hangs.

Pipe Nightmares
- pretty addictive (made more so by the music!)
- my machine had a drawing bug when in windowed mode on the top - left of center the image is garbled. in fullscreen i see nothing.
- sometimes the game seems to pause randomly... maybe it's when the cursor moves off window? i dunno exactly..

My Votes:
Best Overall Game and Polish: Gamut
Most Addictive: Pipe Nightmares

Quote:I think the biggest problem with this game is that the rules of interaction between the coloured balls aren't explained anywhere.

...Except for the Instructions screen. (Gotten to be pressing the Instructions button on the starting-screen) :-)

Hams_:

Okay, the next released versions will have different buttons, as this has been a common comment :-)
I'm hoping including a tutorial will help get peopl thinking along the right lines and make the game more interesting.
Yeah, I actually agree with you on that one. My first set of levels had heaps of red herrings, and I decided it wasn't the way to go so I removed them all. Except, as it turns out two remained on the third level (the top two yellow balls). Sorry about that.

Really really liked this game. Thought it was a neat idea, and liked the level design, as well. A couple of problems are, as people have pointed out, rotating pieces is mildly annoying (perhaps arrow keys could do this?) and its not easy to see which pieces on the map are editable and which arenâ€™t (you have to individually click on them). But Iâ€™m very definitely looking forward to further development of this one :-)

Mmingles

As mentioned, this one quit at launch, for me.

GlobeGoons

I liked this game because it was simple and easy to grasp, but also fun and mildly addictive :-) After losing a game you donâ€™t seem to be able to start another (or rather you can, but the objects donâ€™t respond to mouse clicks). Perhaps some variables are not being reset? Pleased to hear youâ€™ll also be putting more post-contest time and effort into this one :-)

Pipe Nightmare

I liked this game for being simple and addictive. Thereâ€™s not really a lot I can think of to say about this one; itâ€™s just a really nice little time-killer. Good job. :-)

Well done to everyone who finished, very cool games all round. If the creator of Mmingles knows why it doesn't seem to work for some people, and fixes this, I'd love to play that one, too

hams_ Wrote:sometimes the game seems to pause randomly... maybe it's when the cursor moves off window? i dunno exactly..

hams_, the game pauses when the application moves to the background (if you click out of the window by accident, for instance). I forgot to put this in the readme for the contest version, but the P key pauses and resumes.

Malarkey Wrote:Pipe Nightmares: This one too could've use right mouse button suport. Especially since I'm stuck using my mouse left handed and the tab key is on the left side of the keyboard... Still, I like this one a lot too. And actually, what I would like to see also is keyboard support since I find mouse control in games like these a little funky.

Malarkey, what do you mean by "right mouse button support"? Right clicking does the same thing in Pipe Nightmares as left clicking for me.
I decided not to implement keyboard control because I couldn't figure out how to balance it well. On one hand, you want to be able to move the wrench as quickly as possible, but on the other, it can't move too quickly or it won't be accurate enough. How does right/left arrows for moving and space or return for rotationg sound? I could add keyboard support (maybe even configurable) and a "keyboard sensitivity" setting to adjust the rotation speed.

I posted a newer version with slightly changed gameplay (see my above post) at http://www.fireyesoftware.com/iridescent...res1.1.zip. This version does not have the larger wrench size. I think removing that makes the game more dependent on skill, and therefore a better game. I'm interested in hearing what others think of this.

My favorite overall. Exactly the sort of game that I hoped to see in this contest. The gameplay wasn't particularly intuitive at first, but the excellent instructions screen clears it right up. An indicator that the level is complete would have been nice, not to mention a few more levels, but what's there is solid and quite well polished.

Globegoons

Pretty exact Splash Back clone. The main gameplay worked OK, other than having to restart the application each time you return to the splash screen. The game seemed a bit unfinished, so there isn't much else to say...

Mmingles

Seemed like an interesting concept, but unfortunately was unfinished and quite buggy. I'd be interested to see this if it was cleaned up and developed further. Out of curiosity, what was up with the static on the ground?

Pipe Nightmares

A bit strange for the puzzle theme, but no matter. The only entry to feature audio of any kind, in the form of background music. The polish level is high, although the gameplay gets a bit redundant after a while.

I am still working on Mmingles - a little slower than in the first week, but possibly that helps. I currently have a version that is absolutely stable, loads levels perfectly but features absolutely no graphics of any kind (lots of text output though!)
SDL seems not to play nice with some of the other stuff I want to use (or possibly the other way round). I can't load LibXML into SDL projects, for instance, so I am redoing the input and graphics at the moment. Hopefully in a few weeks I should have a much nicer, more reliable version that you can all pick holes in.

@ThemsAllTook:
I didn't want to mark out the map grid with solid lines, so I decided to use broken up dotted lines. The function I was using just randomly disabled about 50% of the pixels so it was different every time it refreshed. Eventually I was going to optimise the graphics by only redrawing areas that had actually changed, after which you would never have noticed. That would have fixed the left over pixels around the edges when the Mmingles wandered off the edge of the map too.